France’s Macron Defends His Business-Friendly Stance

PARIS — Faced with declining poll numbers and suspicions that he favors the rich, President Emmanuel Macron of France fiercely defended his business-oriented approach in a speech on Monday, declining to renounce policies that have seen decreases in taxes for the wealthy as well as in protections for workers.

“If you want to share the cake, you’ve got to have a cake,” Mr. Macron told a joint session of the French Parliament, in what he has established as an American-style annual state of the union address. “It’s misleading to fight for employees if you don’t also defend companies.”

Mr. Macron, sometimes mocked for what critics call a monarchical style, was not giving up any of it on Monday in his address to Parliament. It took place in the richly ornamented setting of the royal palace at Versailles, and he was shown on French television striding solemnly toward the chamber between two rows of resplendent red-uniformed plumed guards.

To critics, that aura is of a piece with his program. Since taking office, he has stunned the French with a rapid rollout of laws changing labor, railways, taxes and education. These overhauls have reversed or chipped away at years of French social and economic policy, making the labor market more flexible, lightening the fiscal burden on the rich, ending the protected status of railway workers, and making universities mildly selective.

But the changes have yet to improve the quality of life for most people in France — unemployment still hovers around 10 percent — and there is increasing grumbling that he is neglecting the social safety net, which is sacrosanct in France.

His support has been eroding. A recent widely reported poll found that only 29 percent considered his policies “fair.” Just 32 percent of respondents expressed confidence in him, a drop of 6 percentage points in one month, and there has been a sharp decrease in support from left-leaning voters who helped propel him into office in the spring of 2017.

The warning signs have come not only from polls measuring esteem, or absence of it, for Mr. Macron.

Opposition politicians, largely invisible in his first year, have become increasingly bold. The French are indicating that they do not agree with the president’s oft-repeated assertion that the left-right split is outmoded, and that he occupies the ideal center.

A recent poll of voting intentions for next year’s European Parliament elections found the far-right Rassemblement National (which until recently was called the National Front) at 19 percent.

In Monday’s speech at Versailles, Mr. Macron cited his “humility” up front and pleaded for more time for his “transformations to take hold in the country.” But he then proceeded to stick to the guiding philosophy of his presidency: a rejection of welfare-state redistribution, an insistence that generalized prosperity is the key to lifting disadvantaged people out of poverty, and an American-style emphasis on equality of opportunity rather than outcome.

“The key to a strong economy is investments,” Mr. Macron said. “These are reforms not to favor the rich, but to favor business. It’s a policy for business, and for the whole country. Investment is for the whole country.”

“I don’t like castes, rents or privileges,” he added. “The creation of riches is the foundation stone of equity.”

“A strong economy is the foundation of our social project, a plan for improving the life of everybody,” Mr. Macron said, again breaking with the dogma of France’s leftist governments, in one of which he was once a member.

“Let’s not kid ourselves,” he said. “We have increasing inequality. But what we have is an inequality of destiny, according to where you were born, how you were raised. This is what obsesses me. We need to attack the deep roots of inequality of destiny.”

It was not the first time Mr. Macron, a former banker, has unsettled some in France with American-style rhetoric extolling capitalism. In one speech, he spoke derisively of passing by “people who are nothing” in train stations. In 2016, when a union activist told Mr. Macron, then the economy minister, that he had “not a penny to pay for a suit” like the ones Mr. Macron likes to wear, he responded, “The best way to pay for a suit is to work.”

One of the most anticipated, and feared, of Mr. Macron’s promised overhauls are cuts to France’s vast government expenditures, which at 56 percent of economic output are one of the highest in the West. Mr. Macron said on Monday that his prime minister would present “strong and courageous choices,” but said nothing concrete.

Reaction from analysts was mixed. “It was very rich and dense, in the sense that Emmanuel Macron touched on his main themes, like the ‘society of emancipation,’” Bruno Cautrès of Sciences Po said in an interview.

“He explained that his project was to redefine the role of the state, and that the French model has created a society of status,” Mr. Cautrès said.

“He wants to preserve the role of the state, but on a new foundation,” the political scientist said. “To give back to individuals the possibility of affirming their life project,” he said, to “those without status in the society.”

Opposition politicians found little to like.

“It was not marked by the seal of justice and equality,” a spokesman for the Socialists, Boris Vallaud, told French television.

Marine Le Pen, the leader of the Rassemblement National, said on television that Mr. Macron’s speech “was like a training session with a personal coach.”

“As far as social injustice,” she said, “the French are going to have their fill of it.”

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